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The U.S. government was forced to take a critical cybersecurity database offline recently after a National Institute of Standards and Technology firewall detected an attack on the agency's servers. The infiltration of the National Vulnerability Database, which houses data on viruses and other bugs, happened because of Adobe ColdFusion vulnerabilities and reportedly persisted for two months before being detected and patched.

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Iran stopped expansion of its uranium-enrichment program after President Hassan Rouhani took office, according to a U.N. inspection report. The International Atomic Energy Agency says that since August, Iran hasn't added major components to a plutonium-producing reactor that is of special concern to the U.S. and its allies. The report could help diplomatic efforts to end U.S.-backed economic sanctions on Iran.

U.S. companies are on track to build spacecraft to take astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station by 2017, ending the nation's reliance on Russia's Soyuz spacecraft, says Charles Bolden, NASA administrator. SpaceX's Dragon and Orbital Science's Cygnus are at the head of the pack of spacecraft developed by private companies to take over the cargo job.

The Turkish government announced it will establish a cybersecurity agency to deal with an expected surge in the number of attacks on national computer systems following a police crackdown on protests. Turkish Transport, Maritime Affairs and Communications Secretary Binali Yildirim said the planned Center for Response to National Cyber Threats was conceived after reports surfaced that hacker groups had allied with protesters.

The Internet Systems Consortium reports that it has fixed a potential distributed-denial-of-service vulnerability in BIND 9 DNS servers. "By sending a recursive resolver a query for a record in a specially malformed zone, an attacker can cause BIND 9 to exit with a fatal 'RUNTIME_CHECK' error in resolver.c," ISC said Tuesday.

The State Department has ordered Defense Distributed, a Texas-based nonprofit software distributor, to remove from the Internet drawings of the world's first operational firearm created using a consumer-grade 3D printer. The open-source weapons project led to the recent test firing of the "Liberator" handgun -- which is made almost entirely of plastic polymer -- and has prompted two states and the District of Columbia to look into banning the printed guns.